Once upon a time, my friend had a rat deck. Endless Relentless Rats and Marrow-Gnawer to duplicate the hordes. It was nasty and I hated it.
But I liked rats. So, many years later, I decided to build my own rat deck but I didn't want to use Relentless Rats at all. I came across the Accursed Witch
and decided to theme it around a witch who blighted a town that shunned her, cursing them and setting loose a plague of vermin. This theme has long since passed away in favour of efficiency but the core remains. Rats and Curses, all night long.
REWORKED RATS AND CHANGED-UP CURSES
This is the reworked version of the deck given acquisition of a few new cards and the release of the brand new Burglar Rat from Guilds of Ravnica.
Rat-tics:
The Key in this deck is 5 land. If you can reach that fifth land you're good to go. Unless you live in Magical Christmas Land you can't guarantee that 5 land sequence every time you draw so, we have a few measures in place to ensure we can draw into our chokehold on the game. We do this through 3 primary paths: The Chittering Horde, Eat Their Hands & Hex Hold.
The Chittering Horde:
This part of the deck is mainly here to buy us time to draw into the components of Hex Hold but it can very easily become the win condition we never knew we needed.
Early drop Typhoid Rats and Swarmyard gives us regenerating, deathtouch blockers that can make our opponents think twice about trading in and if we folllow these up with Pack Rat we can start burning any surplus cards from our hands to flood the board with ever more swole rats! It's not uncommon for Pack rats in this deck to hit double digits (in both numbers and stats).
Ogre Slumlord will give all our other rats deathtouch and keep our Pack Rats supplied with power as they chew on enemy minions as well as replace any little rats that die with new ones while Ratcatcher snatch the exact critters we need from our deck.
Specifically he's looking for Pack Rats and Marrow-Gnawer. Marrow-Gnawer is the true win condition of The Chittering Horde as he will pump both our board state and our Pack Rats to truly ridiculous levels as well as give ALL our rodents fear, screwing any non-black,artifact deck over completely. He also combos well with the Slumlord since the rat we sack to Marrow-Gnawer will be replaced by another one if we have them both out.
All the while our Swarmyards will make sure removal can't target our vital rats as easily as it may like.
Eat Their Hands:
The deck can be vulnerable to control and combat tricks if it doesn't get off the ground fast enough so, the best way to stop this is to take it away from our opponents entirely!
With cards like Torment of Scarabs, a playset of Burglar Rat, copies of Distress and Liliana's Caress we can strip answers out of the opponent's hand and bleed them for it too.
The sideboard leans more heavily into this, incase our opponent is well suited to taking down enchantments and has lots of Control using cards like Drainpipe Vermin, Nezumi Bone-Reader and Locust Miser to add stripping power while upping the number of Liliana's Caress to turn it into a potential win-con. Into this mix is thrown Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni who will dutifully fetch us the nastiest beasties our opponents were forced to discard.
Hex-Hold:
The other half of this deck is what the rats are covering for. A series of enchantments that debilitate, deconstruct and outright destroy all of your opponents options. The crux is the Curse of Misfortunes. Once it's attached it's almost certainly a 2 turn death-knell. Assuming that drops on turn 5, turn 6 you pull out Overwhelming Splendor (un-counterable and for free!) and reduce their boardstate to 1/1 nothings. Turn 7 pulls the Curse of Death's Hold and wipes the slate clean. If 1 of the 4 Curse of Misfortunes (CoM) isn't around, maybe one of the 2 Diabolic Tutor cards is.
Other Curses are:
Torment of Scarabs: Here to clear help clear out pesky flyers and other threats to big for the rats to chew through as well as bleed cards or life from our opponent.
Cruel Reality: Torment on Steroids, better ditch that planeswalker or ditch defender or else take a 1/4 of your life total to the face!
Curse of Bloodletting: 3 1/1s isn't so bad, unless they all swing for double damage now! This curse really amps the power of Torment and Tainted Reality too, the tax from each doubling if the requirements aren't met. It also pays dividends when stacked with our next curse...
Curse of Thirst: Dealing 1 damage for each curse isn't bad, especially since it's usually the third or fourth card attached. Then Curse of Bloodletting doubles all that damage up nicely.
Curse of Exhaustion: If your opponent has too much mana and too many options, take them away. Cut the legs off their engine and force their hand to fill, ripe for the discard effects from Eat Their Hand! It also works to control responses to our efforts limiting them to one answer per turn.
In the side board you will find Curse of Echoes. This is very effective against control decks that rely on instant and sorcery tricks as you can bounce them straight back into their faces. This and Curse of Exhaustion are interchangeable as fits your play group or opponent as they each hose a different strategy.
To give our curse-combo some insurance we have the Reito Lanterns. These lovely sconces will slide any destroyed or discarded curse back under our library where Curse of Misfortunes can fetch them once again. So, if you pull one of the white or the red curse don't fret, feed them to a Pack Rat and then Lantern them back into your deck to fight another day. Value!
Just in case you get desperate there are 2 Isolated Chapels in the deck, just to throw people off and provide an alternate casting method for the two white curses if all other options are gone.
The Fourth Condition:
There is a fourth win-con slipped into the deck. A demon prince, locked away beneath sacred ground but when enough ratty-blood has been shed he will emerge! Ormendahl, Profane Prince lurks beneath Westvale Abbey
and generating 5 rats to sac into it is laughably easy. especially hilarious if Ogre Slumlord is there to replace them.
With lifelink, indestructible, haste and (most importantly) flying; the demon can save this deck from the brink of airborne defeat or prop up a starving lifetotal if needed as well as swing in for 9 to the face!
Cursed Conclusion:
I really like this deck. My play-group really does not like this deck. As I said it struggles against flyers and struggles in multiplayer games where it can't bring the full crippling might of its curse cascade crashing callously upon a single target but it seems to hold up against most things nicely.
Critique and comment welcome and certainly encouraged, but from the games it's played it seems to be sitting at a good place.
*f-pre*